The men and the young people, for the most part, were waiting about outside.
I caught the low murmur of a discussion between Captain Sartell and Bachelor Lot, who were sitting on the fence, and knew by the attitude of the listeners gathered around them, that the subject was one of no ordinary interest. I could not help wondering what those two argued concerning death and the immortality of the soul.
The tick! tick! tick! of the clock sounded with persistent distinctness in the room where the women sat, and Grandma Bartlett sighed, and then came the awful whisper:—
"Ah, death's vary sahd—vary sahd."
Grandma Bartlett, superannuated as she was, was the most trite of the Wallencampers.
Aunt Sibylla Cradlebow accepted the lifeless phrase with something almost like a smile of disdain in her magnificent eyes.
"Oh, it's like everything else," she whispered. "It's a mixter! It's a mixter!"
Once the door of the little bedroom opened softly, and Emily appeared on the scene.
"He's got most to the end of his rope," she said, dryly, in answer to the inquiring faces lifted to her own. There was an unnatural brightness in Emily's tearless eyes, and her tone was as sprightly as ever.
"He don't see nothin', and he don't feel nothin', and he don't hear nothin'," she continued; "and it's sech poor work a breathin', he's most give that up, too. It might stop any minute and he not know it. Cinthy's cryin'; I don't see nothin' to cry about. It'll storm before to-morrow, likely—it's dark enough, Lord knows—and them east winds always hurt him so. 'I don't know whether he's worse off, or better off, Cinthy,' says I, 'or whether he's off entirety. But I don't believe a righteous God'll make poor 'Lihu suffer any worse than he has in the last ten weeks.' But it's strange, all the time I was a' sittin' there by him, when he was worst, it kept comin' up before me, jest as he was when he was a little boy. I hadn't thought on him so for years, but it seemed jest as though 'twas back in New Hampshire, where we was born, a' playin' around the old mill again. Him and me was the youngest, we was always together, and I couldn't 'a' called him up so before me, to save me; but there he was, as plain as life, with his little blue checked apron on, a skippin' along towards me over the logs, and his eyes a dancin', and the wind a blowin' his hair out; and all the while I couldn't help a knowin' that 'Lihu was a man grown, a dyin' there before me on the bed.